Words of the Year
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I’ve always found the “word of the year” releases from various dictionaries to be an intriguing insight into contemporary culture. Normally they reflect a true sense of the zeitgeist.
This year?
Hmmm....
Dictionary.com gave “demure” its award. Why? A TikTok lifestyle and beauty influencer named Jools Lebron began making reference to various things as being “very demure, very mindful.” As NPR noted, “‘Demure’ means ‘reserved, quiet or modest,’ but the reaction to Lebron’s use of the word was anything but.”
Nonetheless, of the various words of the year, “demure” gets my “Razzie” award for worst submission. A TikTok influencer coining a phrase that gets 15 minutes of fame is not a snapshot of the year.
Better was Cambridge Dictionary’s anointing of “manifest” as word of the year. Used as a verb, to “manifest” something is “to use methods such as visualization and affirmation to help you imagine achieving something you want, in the belief that doing so will make it more likely to happen.”
What made this word loom large in 2024? According to Cambridge, the use of this sense of “manifest” has gained in popularity with the increasing number of “manifesting influencers” promoting this scientifically unproven practice on social media. Then, between July and September 2024, you had the Olympics and the Paralympics where gold medal winners like Simone Biles gave credit to the practice for their success. Even before that, fans of Sabrina Carpenter called her a “manifesting queen” for landing a career-changing Eras Tour appearance with Taylor Swift. All to say, social media feeds buzzed with advice about how to “manifest your best life.”
Then, Oxford English Dictionary (OED) weighed in with its choice: “brain rot.” Ironically, in light of the choices made by Dictionary.com and Cambridge, it is a word speaking to the effects of social media.
When announcing the word choice, OED noted that the first recorded use of “brain rot” was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experience of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. Thoreau criticized society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favor of simple ones—all of which reflected a general decline in mental and intellectual effort. As he wrote at the time, “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot—which prevails so much more widely and fatally?”
“The term has taken on new significance in the digital age,” OED notes, “amidst societal concerns about the negative impact of overconsuming online content.” The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024 as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming “excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media.”
As a result, “brain rot” is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”
For example,
... all things “demure” or “manifesting.”
James Emery White
Sources
Elizabeth Blair, “‘Demure’ Is Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year. If That’s News to You, Here’s the Backstory,” NPR, November 26, 2024, read online.
“The Cambridge Dictionary Word of the Year 2024 Is…,” Cambridge Dictionary, read online.
“‘Brain rot’ named Oxford Word of the Year 2024,” Oxford University Press, December 2, 2024, read online.